We messed up
Most of my articles are about how to succeed with apps—for example, How Hours became a top grossing app. Those are fun to write.
This one is not fun to write because it isn’t about success. It is about how we failed many of our users and how we are going to make it right. We firmly believe in doing the right thing even when it hurts. I hope that others can learn from our mistakes, which is why I am writing this publicly.
We launched Hours 2.0 prematurely
Up to this point, quality and reliability had always trumped deadlines. I am not a proponent of Zuck’s “move fast and break things” philosophy (which Mark actually recanted a couple years ago). Being thoughtful, deliberate, and sometimes downright slow is a big part of how we have gained a pretty good reputation for quality, an Apple Design Award, and so on.
Hours is a time tracking app, and no matter how great the design or features are, if it is not reliable it cannot be trusted. Many people depend on Hours to report to their superiors, to make sure they are being productive, or for directly getting paid for their time. For such an app, reliability is essential.
We made reliability a top prioity as we worked on Hours 2.0, which involved not only a redesigned iOS app, but a brand new cloud sync system, a brand new web app, and team support.
This launch was going to be the historic moment where Hours, the popular time tracking app, becomes Hours, the sustainable business. It was the moment we had anticipated for years. It was the moment we could tell our families that all the sleepless nights and working weekends were worth it.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite that way.
Yes, Hours 2.0 is successful from many perspectives. We were #2 on Product Hunt. We got featured heavily by Apple. We had tens of thousands of signups in a couple weeks. We somehow got 20,000 downloads from China in a week. And the product itself is really great — being able to track time on the web with one click, drag time around on the timeline, and see really beautiful visual reports of time are killer features.
But all of that was overshadowed by the fact that, despite the valiant effort of our team leading up to the launch, we simply were not ready.
Although we had a QA team and a hundred beta testers trying to uncover all the worst bugs, a lot changes when you scale from 100 people to tens of thousands in just a few days, especially when sync is involved. It is not that the product didn’t work at all—besides the fact that our servers buckled for four hours on launch day—it actually worked quite well for many people.
But for other users and teams, it did not work like it should have.
As the hundreds of support emails started pouring in, we realized our mistake. What was supposed to be our moment of celebration, became a hectic mixture of answering support requests and fixing the problems. The product that we had been pouring everything into — and that we truly think will revolutionize the way people track their time—was not working correctly for many of our customers. While we got really positive feedback from some users, for others it was unreliable.
Why we launched when we did
Normally, if there is any suspicion that the product needs more time, we delay the launch. But this time we didn’t. Although we now see that launching Hours 2.0 on March 4 was a mistake, it seemed unavoidable at the time.
We have invested thousands of hours over the last year to ship this critical version — the version that will finally be monetizable due to the Hours Pro subscription and team support. We had intended to ship Hours 2.0 months ago but, as so often happens with software projects, we had underestimated the time and cost of development. But we believed in this product so much that we continued to invest time and effort, even at considerable personal cost.
As we got into 2016, pressure to release the product was high. We were missing the target release times that we told many of our users, and we were financially pressed. Unfortunately, we yielded to the pressure.
We put a line in the sand and said we are going to work as hard as we need to, but this thing is shipping in the first week of March. Despite working constantly to make that deadline and being fairly confident that the product was shippable, it wasn’t and we are very sorry about that. We blew it and now we are going to work to regain your confidence and trust.
How we are going to make it right
Although we are working furiously to fix all the issues, we don’t think it is enough to just apologize and do better in the future. Here is what we are going to do to make things right for our users:
- Hours will be completely free to use until we re-launch the product. The re-launch will happen when we feel the product meets our own high standards of quality and reliability. We will be working very hard to get to that point as soon as possible and your feedback will be invaluable in that process.
- For those who have already purchased the yearly subscription, we would like to give you an additional free year of subscription for betting on us early.
- Anyone who already signed up for a monthly subscription can cancel their plan and, if they want, can sign up for the two-year discount described below.
- For those who want to support us during this interim period, if you purchase the Hours Pro yearly subscription before we re-launch the product, you will receive two years for the price of one. For the next 7 days we are also offering a 25% discount on this plan, bringing it to $72 per user—that is equivalent to $3 per user per month. If you or your team believes in Hours, this gives you a way to support us and get a lot of benefit from it while we are working out the kinks. To subscribe, sign in and go to the preferences screen.
- UPDATE: Anyone who purchases the yearly plan before we re-launch will also be invited to our exclusive Hours Insiders Slack community where you get direct access to the entire Hours team to discuss current issues and the future of Hours.
We will email users from our crowdfunding campaign about additional benefits that they will receive as well.
Although it is painful and embarrassing to admit failure and difficult financially to postpone subscription revenue further, we firmly believe that our business will ultimately derive success from being transparent, honest, and accountable to our customers.
For those who are unfamiliar, Hours is a time tracking service that makes it really easy for freelancers and teams to capture and account for your time through the course of the day. Check out the website or download the iOS app.
